Disruptive models of healthcare - Europe's search for new business models

Disruptive innovation seeks to make more healthcare services accessible to people presently denied to them, either because they can’t afford them or they aren’t available. It could also offer simple tools to enable people more involvement in their own healthcare, for instance through cheap genetic screening for diseases and apps that monitor key indicators like blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

However, it takes a long-term view of healthcare that in Europe is increasingly under both financial and demographic pressure. Ageing alone is set to push EU healthcare costs from an average 8.5% of GDP today to an unsustainable 10% by 2060. Without a radical re-think of the healthcare sector’s business models, that figure may be pushed still higher by new technologies and expensive medical breakthroughs.

Keeping costs under control therefore demands a shift from ‘care’ to ‘prevention’. But today’s pricing and reimbursement systems don’t adequately recognise the ways that new technology tools can help change people’s behaviour patterns and create much more cost-effective preventive healthcare systems.

What do governments need to do to encourage new business models? What mechanisms could create the incentives for technological innovation in health to facilitate a paradigm shift? How could new players and economic actors be encouraged into the health sector as catalysts for change? And is there a ‘European’ dimension of the healthcare challenges confronting EU countries?